About Me

I believed that stuff we were taught in high school back in the days before "Social Studies" supplanted history, geography and civics.
I really don't want to talk only about political things. I really want merely to be left alone to follow my own way.

Log

Monday, November 16, 2009

Have we lost our bleeping minds?

The decision has been made to try plotter mastermind (sic) Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York City in an ordinary criminal trial. Are they friggin' nuts? We are going to have a media circus to overshadow the OJ Simpson show trial. Add to that the Billions of dollars in petro-money available to beat or society to death with our own rules of compassion and law. And as icing on the cake, there is probably no harder place to secure in our country than New York City, unless it is the backwoods of Carroll County, Illinois. And that is where we are going to move the rest of them.

Funny about that. Carroll County is in the Northwest corner of Illinois, about two hours west of O'hare Airport. Many years ago, when I lived in Carroll County, the United States Army kept their entire nuclear arsenal at the Savanna Ordnance Depot there. It was secure by remoteness, but it was more secure by secrecy. In the three years I lived there, I knew there was an ammunition plant, but knew nothing about the nuclear presence. Now it has been gone for more than ten years.

Now the presence of an Interstate to Chicago nearby has shrunk the distance (or at least the time) from Chicago by half. And thanks to MSNBC, and the Governor of Illinois, there is no secret about the future use of a local (underused) prison. Thomson Correctional Institute in Thomson, Illinois is a minimal security prison. Normally prison guards watch from towers looking into the prison grounds. But this time the guards will need to watch outside as well, for there is little to stop an assault on a prison this isolated, yet so near the metropolitan areas of Saint Louis, Chicago, Madison, and Minneapolis. That's right, a few hours in any direction and they could meld into massive populations of sympathetic supporters. It is the stuff that bad movies are made of. But is that so far-fetched in this day and age?

Every day we get a new surprise of just how stupid we have become as a nation.